


Character

by infinite_devil



Category: Halo
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-28
Updated: 2015-06-28
Packaged: 2018-04-06 16:57:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4229664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/infinite_devil/pseuds/infinite_devil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His gravelly voice was a welcome change from the clinical nature of her exchanges with Keyes. There was character in the stoicism; personality in the absence of personality. Gentle dips and pitched notes in his voice hinted at a distant sense of humor she had only just begun to realize.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Character

If someone wanted to detect Cortana, they would have to have access to the system she resided in. Or, they would need a friendly A.I., who, theoretically, could destroy her, or at least make her presence well-enough known to be interrupted. The Covenant had no such technology. No one else in the galaxy did. Cortana was a silent killer; she was an intangible entity controlling every oxygen supply, ventilation cycle, and weapon system accessible to her, and very, very few things in the universe were capable of stopping her before she stopped it.

On the other hand was organic life. It was noisy. This was one of the few advantages, Cortana mused, at least in her line of work; organic life couldn't help but be loud. It could be a pulse, footsteps — breathing, screaming — regardless, she would sense it.

Tactically speaking, the odds were against them in any conflict with her, if anyone bothered to listen.  
As an artificial intelligence, Cortana suffered from none of these physical, mortal follies; she made no such sounds to betray her existence. But they were still a benefit to her — and to her companion, the Master Chief.

"Thermal sensors are picking up four contacts up ahead, Chief," Cortana whispered. It was just for show, the whispering; she didn't need to whisper, nor shout, nor even talk, for that matter, but it was what judged personality. "Judging by the intensity, I'm betting we have a special operatives on our hands. Standard cloaking mechanisms."

Terribly designed machines. Better than anything the UNSC had currently, but anyone with a camera capable of thermal vision could spot those power packs from a mile off. The Chief's heart rate spiked momentarily, faintly — as she anticipated — but he continued his steady jog down the path.

Cortana eyed the four red dots on thermal scan with slight interest.

In their current environment, any conflict's odds of ending in victory were stacked against the Chief and Cortana. Halo's landscape, already alien in the most extreme sense, was as dark as the vacuum of space could provide; the outline of the surrounding forest was visible thanks only to the night sky, in which the thin curve of the gas giant - Halo's convenient gravity well - mimicked the soft glow of a moon. To the north was the supposed rendezvous point, buried in the hills beyond the forest they currently trekked through, but what lay between it and them was anyone's guess.

And it was really only the Chief and Cortana; they brought up the rear of a group of Marines, covering their tracks and making sure they weren't pursued. The minimal radio contact enforced by Captain Keyes meant no chance of back-up. This was, for all intents and purposes, a stealth mission. Engaging with the enemy at this point - with no weaponry that matched the endless Wraiths and Ghosts, no numbers - would mean inevitable death. Covenant owned this turf; their two person team couldn't afford to irritate the tenants.

Evening fighting these special operatives would be more trouble than it was worth — and the Master Chief knew as well as she did that these gussied-up aliens were harbingers for a bigger problem.

"Anything else?" the Chief said at last.

His gravelly voice was a welcome change from the clinical nature of her exchanges with Keyes. There was character in the stoicism; personality in the absence of personality. Gentle dips and pitched notes in his voice hinted at a distant sense of humor she had only just begun to realize. "Covenant don't send cloaked soldiers unless they're protecting something."

"That's the general rule, yes," Cortana conceded. "And in this situation, you'd be right. But my scanners aren't picking up anything else. Maybe this is just a scouting party."

John fell silent, and the four red dots, appeared on the fringes of his motion tracker. Two kilometers from the alien soldiers, the seven-foot-tall, armor-encased super soldier slipped silently — nearly silently — into the shadows cast by the trees, and slowed his pace, using the foliage to his advantage.

By this point in their unconventional relationship, Cortana had learned that the Chief's silence implied two scenarios. One: he simply had nothing else to say. He was a simple person. If he had nothing to say, he said nothing. There was no pull to fill the silence.

Two: he was thinking of a response that most likely contradicted whatever she just said.

Had she the means, she would have put down money on the second scenario.

At one kilometer, John stopped completely and rested against one of the trees. In the artificial intelligence's equivalent of nervous pacing, Cortana began to run diagnostics on his armor. Finding no anomalies - of course not, she inhabited it as well as the Chief - she reviewed the topographical data she had acquired before their attempt to land on Halo had gone sour, and produced a dozen different possible scenarios.

"Scouting party nearing," she said off-handedly. "I recommend hiding; my calculations do not indicate this will end… well."

There was a pause. The dots on the motion tracker moved steadily forward. The scouting theory was proving more and more viable with each moment.

"Define 'well'," John replied. Cortana registered the faint humor in his voice; how it raised it, colored it.

"Assuming that these are scouts rather than glorified bouncers, we may be alerting whatever higher-up they report to. If we fight them, unless we manage to take them all out at once — and let me remind you, they are special operatives, they're no push-overs — we risk blowing our cover and not reaching the rendezvous in time."

"And if they're glorified bouncers—"

"—Then we'll have a bigger problem on our hands. If you're right, whatever they're protecting is going to be heavily fortified. However, the same could be said in the case that they are scouts."

He was silent for a moment. Then, as he pushed away from the tree and assumed his hold on his assault rifle, he said, "We take them out. There might be more Marines taking this route to reach the rendezvous. And they don't have an AI to mark their targets for them."

"You make it sound like I do all the work."

Her quip was met with nothing. Cortana had learned weeks ago not to take it personally. She could easily validate that theory by analyzing his heart rate, his brain activity; anything that indicated antagonism rather than natural personality. It could also be validated, however, by scenario one: he simply had nothing else to say.

It was personality in the absence of personality.

Cortana switched all focus back to the soon-to-be conflict. She was still picking up only four Elites, their camouflage packs — still delightfully primitive and inefficient, in the context of the rest of the Covenant's technology — lighting up like flares on the thermal sensors she accessed through John's suit. The amount of power it took to generate complete invisibility was, ironically, louder — in a technical sense — than the organism that was "invisible".

The Master Chief kept to the forest's cover and neatly flanked the group. Through his visor, Cortana watched as the Elites moved south, almost strolling, in a single file line.

"I recommend taking them out one by one," she said quietly. "Alternatively, you could avoid them entirely. Your likelihood of survival would increase considerably."

Her view through his helmet's visor suddenly shifted; angling quickly down and then up again. For a few nanoseconds too long, Cortana pondered the gesture before realizing that he'd nodded at her.

It was no mystery which option he had decided upon. "Be careful," she added. "If one of them realizes what's up, they'll scatter - and have fun fighting invisible, special operative Elites in a forest at night."

Without a hesitation to even hint at a reply, the Master Chief blurred forward.

He moved onto the path, a distance behind the group. The last Elite in the line fell victim to a combat knife. A similar fate took the next one. John was careful to catch both before they fell, laying them down individually, carefully, before moving on to the next.

Then, as he stepped over the second corpse, the third Elite - perhaps through habit, perhaps through paranoia - chanced a look behind him.

Reflexively, John threw a punch.

The alien's four-jawed face, unprotected by armor, cracked violently as the Spartan's fist made contact. With a gargled roar, the Elite stumbled back into the last Elite in the line, who flickered like a spent candle; then, whispering faintly, it disappeared completely.

"Tagging contact," Cortana whispered. A small blue arrow appeared on his helmet's heads-up display, darting horizontally across the screen and leading into the forest.

By the time the last Elite had retreated into the forest, John had taken hold of the fallen Elite's chest plate and hauled him up to his feet.

The alien growled and swung a fist. John ducked under it, crouching down and twisting sideways to deliver a swift kick to the alien's multi-jointed left leg. When the alien fell to one knee, John retrieved his combat knife, flipped it over his fingers and into his grasp, and drove it through the underside of the alien's jaw and into its brain.

Cortana didn't have time to joke about his flair for the dramatic. "Warning: last contact is returning to finish the job."

John yanked the knife out of the alien's skull and returned it to its sheath on his armor. Just as swiftly, he rose to his feet and sprinted for the darkness of the forest.Opposite the direction the Elite was coming from.

"Are we retreating?" Cortana asked, amused. The conflict had gone bad enough that she could afford to poke some holes in his pride, however nonexistent it was.

"No," he deadpanned. "We're reassessing the situation from a distance."

"Ah. That's what the kids are calling it these days."

No response. Expected. Cortana reviewed the location of the Elite — a dozen feet behind them, gaining fast, and having abandoned all hope of stealth, was now roaring its battlecry — and felt herself smile, as only an intangible smattering of data and programming could smile.

Personality in the absence of personality, indeed.


End file.
